French Basques of Bakersfield, California

The itinerant Basque sheepherder moving his flock from central California's San Joaquin Valley across remote desert wastes into alpine meadows of the Sierra Nevada mountain range and the Basque matron working tireless hours in hotels, boardinghouses, and ranches to create enclaves of familiarity and domestic comfort remain as much a part of the collective imagery of expanding European settlement in the American West as do the cowboy, farmer, and miner. Yet immigration to America for many French Basques in the West was only a way to escape the various hardships experienced in their home country. For most, immigration and subsequent shepherding in the western United States was a means toward later acquiring their own flocks or establishing a small business. The vast majority were single males, whose purpose and drive was for financial independence—acquiring enough money to return home or to marry. Bakersfield, in California's San Joaquin Valley, became one focal point of French Basque culture. Today, French Basques have assimilated into the multitiered social fabric of Bakersfield as doctors, lawyers, judges, businesspeople, farmers, ranchers, and, of course, sheepmen.

Kern County's more than 8,000 square miles lie at the southern end of California's Central Valley and includes the San Joaquin Valley. Geographically, it covers areas that include the Mojave Desert and its desert-dwelling Joshua tree, to the Sequoias high in the Sierra Nevada. It straddles the San Andreas Fault and is used today primarily for livestock grazing, and petroleum. Bakersfield, California, lies in the heart of Kern County. Established in 1853 by a group of small farmers whose interest was settlement rather than the search for gold, it was named after one of these early settlers, Colonel Thomas Baker. Baker's Field was primarily a resting place for travelers before they began moving into the dry reaches of the Owens Valley. Surveyed and planned by Colonel Baker in 1863, the town of Bakersfield was part of the 87,120 acres he received for having reclaimed 400,000 acres of swamp and overflow land. Baker's title would make up a large portion of what is today Kern County, which was then part of both Tulare and Los Angeles Counties. The town of Bakersfield was incorporated in 1873, and a year later it replaced the town of Havilah as the county seat.

The French Basque colony that established itself in 1874 in east Bakersfield coincided with the coming of the Southern Pacific Railroad and would lie across the Kern River from Bakersfield in what was once the town of Sumner in 1874. From the 1870s through to the 1880s, there remained a competition for rail service throughout California. This competition, coupled with land speculation, created “not a cattle boom, but a farm boom.” In less than one year, land prices had jumped 200 percent. In 1893, Sumner was incorporated as Kern City. With the rapid growth and expansion of Bakersfield, Kern City would be absorbed into its larger neighbor in 1910, and subsequently designated east Bakersfield.

French Basques are identified as those coming from the three French regions of Lapurdi, Behe-Nafarro (“Lower Navarre”), and Zuberoa. These same regions today are known in France as Labourd, Basse-Navarre, [Page 248]and La Soule, and are part of the Pyrénées Atlantiques département, or Bayonne. Basques refer to their home territory as Euskal Herria. Their language, Euskera, is shared with the four Spanish Basque regions of Vizcaya, Guipuzcoa, Alava, and Navarra.

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